#99 - May 1, 2009, 10:34 p.m.
Q u o t e:
I understand that you guys feel the need to include the casual players in ingame...but nerfing 25 mans are unnecessary. Yes, there are high end guilds that have cleared it, and there are a ton of guilds that can't kill razorscale. But that's not because the bosses are too hard. Its because the players aren't good enough. Naxx (and you all know it is true) was so easy compared to anything in Burning Crusade that players have been pampered into one shotting bosses and if they have to spend more than one night on it, they cry. I have honestly been loving progressing through Ulduar. Our guild has done everything except Mirimon, General Vexus, Freya, and Yogg, and we are by no means a high end raiding guild. But we don't go in there and one shot it like we did with naxx. We go in, and we progress. We know that if we don't run out with the Gravity Bomb, we are going to kill the raid. We understand that if you stand in the fire on Razorscale you are going to die and fast. And if we can't dps Kologarn's right arm fast enough then people are going to die.
And that is the way it SHOULD be. You didn't stand in the raid on Solarian with the wrath debuff and not wipe half the raid. You couldn't run around in flame wreath and only take a small amount of damage. In Burning Crusade, if you messed up, then it was over, and that is the way it should be. Because when you mess up, you get in there, and you TRY again, and if you are a GOOD player, the second time around, you don't wipe the raid again. Ulduar was supposed to be on the same difficulty of SSC and TK...and it IS. You didn't see the majority of guilds get through those in a week. Don't expect it here. Let us progress.
I might be overeacting to the patch notes...I haven't gotten to see it in action yet, but our guild, and tons of guilds out there have proven that this content is doable. But from what I am seeing, all the ulduar changes in 3.1.2 are nerfs in the amount of damage different raid elements inflict. And there is no reason to. If players are having problems with the way it is now...then they need to run ulduar 10, or go back to naxx and get the rest of those upgrades. Leave Ulduar to the raids that have proven they can do it, and stop making content easy enough for everyone...because all it does is drive away the most commited and strongest players in the game.
It's a good post, Aavryn. Thank you for taking the time to write up some good feedback for us. :)
With that said, I think our views on raid content are at odds. If you're having difficulty comparing the raid content of Wrath to the raid content of Burning Crusade, it's because our philosophy changed a little bit. You say Ulduar's difficulty is supposed to be on par with SSC and TK, but that's not really true. The primary goal in this expansion -- and the reason we've implemented 10/25-player, and hard modes -- is to give as many people access to the raid content as possible. Just given the nature of raid dungeons, so many resources need to be poured into making them, from art, design, and story boarding, to programming and testing. It's a very intensive process and we want our players to experience the end result.
For this reason we're continuing with the philosophy that pick-up groups should have some level of success when raiding. Coordination and effort will still be necessary, as will the appropriate level of gear; but we don't want capable groups hitting brick walls, at least not within the first few boss encounters of Ulduar.
The difference in difficulty between 10-player and 25-player modes should also be fairly minimal. The distinction here is between the guilds that might not have the resources to more-than-double the size of their raid. 25-player content should be more difficult, but only incrementally. You'll find all the brick walls and incredibly challenging encounters in hard modes, and they're worth the effort and status for the experienced raiders.
I hope you don't take any of this to mean we expect anyone to waltz through Ulduar. That's not necessarily the case. You still need to know what you're doing and be appropriately geared for the fights. Even so, we want to get players in the door and have them feeling a natural, though slight progression in difficulty with each boss encountered.
When it comes to nerfing difficulty, we do intentionally tend to slightly over-tune things at the start. Our goal is to watch players of all levels of skill attempt each encounter, and then adjust the encounters according to the percentage of raids we expect to be killing specific bosses. While some may see this as us giving content to be people who don't deserve it, we feel it's a lot better than taking away content if we were, say, to make encounters too easy from the start and then buff them up after the fact.
The days of a marginal amount of players having a go at our raid dungeons are mostly over. We're continuing to brain storm ideas to keep the most-skilled raiders feeling challenged and rewarded, but we're going to continue ensuring that smaller guilds and players who haven't as much time to play each week get a reasonable chance to progress in each Wrath raid dungeon released.
